Storytelling in Marketing: An Interview With Warren Whitlock

At Pubcon 2015 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to speak with Warren Whitlock, of LimitlessInfluence.com, about storytelling in marketing.

You can’t just market with data alone. You need to use that data to tell a story. A story is what sparks emotion in people and gets them the share it, link to it, and so on.

In the video below, Warren explains how businesses can better incorporate storytelling into their content marketing:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

Warren starts off by saying keywords matter still matter, but they should not come before telling a good story.

Optimization is taking a good story and making sure it fits the medium in which its being published.

Old school of though used to be to to fulfill a word count while incorporating X-amount of phrases. It’s still easy for SEOs to get carried away with this.

Search engines ultimately want to present the best information — content that tells the best story while giving searchers what they need tends to rank well.

Warren offers up a simple strategy for brands: get down to the essence of what the brand needs to tell, tell it in the right away, optimize it for search, see what ends up boosting your KPIs, then create more of that content.

The best thing to come out of the past 10 years in SEO, Warren says, are the tools available today to facilitate easier content creation.

Warren gives Amazon as an example a site that is perfectly well optimized. This is particularly notable since 40% of e-commerce searches start on the e-commerce site itself. Warren also commends Amazon for diversifying its traffic through things like its app. It’s now gotten to the point where companies are optimizing for Amazon as well as optimizing for Google.